Gaudí’s untimely death might well have sounded the death knell for the costly Sagrada Família. It was a project that appeared as if it might never end. Its guiding spirit and inspiration, its driving force and unflagging source of energy and optimism, even during the darkest of days, was no longer there to light the way. After the eulogies to Gaudí had been read and his genius proclaimed, reality and the cold facts had to be faced. Over the years the Sagrada Família had occasionally run into financial difficulties. Again and again the project was saved at the last minute by donations that kept the deliveries of materials coming in and the builders on site. Who can now judge whether these acts of charity had been in part a reward for Gaudí’s dogged perseverance and the recognition of his genius, rather than a passionate devotion to the Sagrada Família per se?
It would be wrong not to remember and acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that Gaudí and the Modernista style were rapidly falling out of fashion. Decorative detailing and obsession with overfussy ornament was distinctly passé and depressingly reminiscent of the dark days of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there were still some who were prepared to swim against the tide and the seductive allure of fashion, and celebrate the unique qualities of Gaudí’s vision and style. The multitudes who had attended Gaudí’s funeral offered a genuine outpouring of their emotions in tribute to his extraordinary contribution and his central position in the formation of a Catalan cultural identity which celebrated the sacred trinity of craft, creativity and Catholicism. The danger of recognising Gaudí, however, as the true apotheosis of Catalan genius, was that without him nothing could ever be the same. With Gaudí gone, who was there to pick up the mantle?
It is perhaps all too easy to play the game of ‘What if?’ The long autumn of 1926, following Gaudí’s death, offered ample time for reflection. Not just time to measure Gaudí’s legacy and his originality but also to see whether the Sagrada Família could continue without his peculiar charisma, driving dedication and the loyalty of his team. Gaudí’s death offered a legitimate chance to take stock and totally rethink a build that had been swallowing up funds while moving forward at a painfully slow pace. It would not be the first time that a governing board like the Asociación’s Junta de Obras would use a fortuitous moment to totally change direction or even pull the plug. Was this perhaps a great opportunity for the bishopric of Barcelona to capitalise on the confusion and impose their wishes on this private body? Were the Devotion and the Sagrada Família still in tune with the larger picture of Vatican policy, or had the catastrophe of the Great War dramatically changed its priorities? Finally, might the Vatican now get involved with the Sagrada Família in a more proactive way?
These were issues that needed thinking through, but there were also more pressing and practical considerations to take into account. First and foremost, had Gaudí left enough of a footprint and enough documentation, plans and models to guide a successor who might be willing to continue the works? Gaudí had always found solutions to problems thrown up by the architectural process in a creative and reactive way regarding the materials, mechanics, statics, engineering and every other aspect of the design process. As a man manager he had gained the respect, loyalty and affection of his team. The profundity of his religious and spiritual investigations were quite extraordinary, given he was a full-time architect as opposed to a practising priest or theologian. It goes without saying that these were qualities that were next to impossible to replicate amongst Catalonia’s architectural fraternity. His aesthetic sensibility was unique, with a magical and uncanny capacity for blending the everyday and apparently ugly, while still managing to wed it to the standard canons of beauty in order to create something entirely new. This was Gaudí’s special gift, shared only with Josep Maria Jujol, who after collaborating with him on the Park Güell had gone out on his own and was working predominantly down in Tarragona. If Jujol and the architect-theorist Joan Rubió i Bellver were both now running their own studios and could not be tempted back, who was there with the ability to step into Gaudí’s shoes?
Up until his death in February 1914, Francesc Berenguer, Gaudí’s braç dret – right arm – had been his principal head of studio when the architect’s absence for reasons of health or work on the cathedral in Palma de Mallorca called him away. Berenguer’s death was a tragic loss but Gaudí’s studio was full of other talented architects. The least known but arguably the most important assistant to work under Gaudí was Domènec Sugrañes i Gras. Photos of him late in life with his impressive walrus moustache and hangdog face suggest a serious and solid burgès, a scion of the Catalan bourgeoisie. Sugrañes and Gaudí’s relationship went back a long way. Sugrañes passed one of the most important qualifications in coming from Reus, the city of Gaudí’s birth – and from the same social artisan trading class – where his parents ran the sweet shop El Globo (sweets being one of Gaudí’s very few indulgences). Allegedly Gaudí had seen promise in the young Domènec’s skills as a draughtsman when he spotted him sketching in the sweetshop. Twenty-six years younger than Gaudí, Sugrañes followed in the elder architect’s footsteps to Barcelona University in 1894, and two years later, aged only eighteen, was taken under Gaudí’s, wing; in his guiding role as mentor, Gaudí offered the teenage Domènec his first work experience. Of all Gaudí’s team, Sugrañes was perhaps the closest to his own profile of the ideal architect.
Gaudí, however strong-headed and argumentative, had an uncanny gift for getting the best out of his collaborators and giving them creative space. Sugrañes was no exception, and amongst his private commissions he was responsible for emblematic buildings such as the spectacular Monumental bullring of 1915, a twist on the Gaudínian neo-Mudéjar style (still awaiting redevelopment today, as the offer by the Emir of Qatar in 2014 to transform it into Europe’s largest mosque finally fell through). Like Berenguer, Sugrañes was taken on by Gaudí years before officially qualifying as an architect. Gaudí had a healthy disdain for the official academic route into the architectural profession and no doubt felt, and not without reason, that his workshop was a more worthwhile experience than any dusty drawing hall or endless hours spent with an uninspiring teacher.
Sugrañes would come to work with Gaudí on the Torre Bellesguard – where he played his variation on the trencadís Gaudí house style – and on the masterpieces Casa Batlló, Park Güell, Colonia Güell and La Pedrera. Perhaps Gaudí saw in Domènec Sugrañes the man he might have become had his romantic life taken a different turn. Sugrañes, unlike Gaudí, married. His wife was the unusually liberated Xaviera de Franc, who had studied art at the Acadèmia Borrell. Over the years the growing mutual respect and trust between the two men meant that Sugrañes would step into the vacuum left by Berenguer and become Gaudí’s braç dret and eventually one of the executors of his estate. Over the years they grew so close that Sugrañes, on his day off, accompanied by his son Ramon, would join Gaudí on his Sunday stroll along the promenade to listen to the master’s musings on the Mediterranean’s classical past and the peculiar quality of its light, which he felt was perfect for a real understanding of volume.
Sugrañes was the obvious choice for the junta if they wanted to continue with the works. His intimate knowledge of Gaudí’s plans for the Sagrada Família suggested a smooth transition, but there were also reasons to be cautious. Sugrañes, with Gaudí’s blessing, had also taken on private work. In 1924, close to Reus, his project for the country villa Mas del Llevat signalled a distinct move towards the more classical Noucentisme style that was becoming increasingly fashionable. Sgraffito-carved plaster motifs framed an entrance that suggested an interior of classical calm: harmonic, symmetrical and a return to the straight line. In the coastal resort of Salou, in 1924, the elegant Casa Loperena followed a similar idiom, succeeded in 1925 by the more radical Casa Solimar, a revolutionary apartment block whose austerity seemed to look to north European precedents from Berlage to the Bauhaus. Did Sugrañes have the requisite humility to submit to Gaudí’s plans and to a style that might be rapidly going out of date?
Was, indeed, Sugrañes up to the challenge that the Sagrada Família posed? Gaudí had frequently insisted that God’s divine presence was encrypted into the complex patterns and arcane geometry of nature. In many ways Gaudí’s response to nature was a cross between that of the great eighteenth-century amateur ‘parson-naturalist’ the Reverend Gilbert White, and a sophisticated scientist seeking out the secrets to creation. Was Sugrañes, left to his own devices, capable of breaking and reading that code?
Right at the beginning of his career, back in 1878, Gaudí wrote a revealing essay on religious architecture entitled La construcción del templo. Despite the unique trajectory of his career, which passed through neo-Gothic, Victorian eclecticism, neo-Mudéjar, Modernisme and then on towards a unique and revolutionary new personal style, his observations back in 1878 still ring true. ‘The church,’ he stated, ‘should inspire a sense of Divinity, with all its infinite qualities and attributes.’
With no interviews or conversations between Gaudí and Sugrañes on record we can only assume that master and assistant went through everything in exacting detail. What we do know, however, from Album 4, published in 1929, was that the Sagrada Família plans and models had been continually reworked and refined. The innocent viewer looking at Gaudí’s work for the first time, used to the generic cube-like quality of most other buildings, should be forgiven for seeing the surreal surface and assuming that Gaudí was the master of caprice and permanent improvisation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Album 4, like all the previous editions, compared the Sagrada Família to other cathedrals – in this instance, the early classic Gothic St Elizabeth’s church in Marburg built by the Order of the Teutonic Knights, as well as Our Lady of Strasbourg, the tallest building of the entire Middle Ages, which Goethe described as the ‘sublimely towering, wide-spreading tree of God’. There could be no better description of the effect Gaudí hoped to achieve at the Sagrada Família.
Further illustrations of the capitals for the elegant triforium which bathed the nave in light displayed once again Gaudí’s capacity for creating an entirely new design, one that blended Visigothic simplicity with an eccentric barley twist.
The forest of columns that marched up the nave like poplars lining a French road, and those circumnavigating the altar, were dedicated to the various Catholic sees across mainland Spain; some have cited the eucalyptus tree as inspiration for this lapidary forest. On entering the Gloria façade the first two columns encountered were Santiago de Compostela and Toledo, respectively Europe’s greatest pilgrimage site and the primate cathedral of Spain. Nodding to both, the design of the Sagrada Família also set out Gaudí’s intention to rival the two and give Catalonia a new spiritual centre like a contemporary Montserrat. Passing on through, the next columns were dedicated to Valencia, Zaragoza, Granada, Burgos, Seville and Valladolid, amongst others. On the transept the columns were given over to Vic, Solsona, Tortosa and La Seu d’Urgell, while around the holy of holies the four that framed the altar were dedicated to Barcelona, Gerona, Tarragona and Lleida. Nothing had been left to chance. Catalonia, of course, in the hierarchy of Spanish churches, was right at the top.
Sugrañes was the perfect disciple, changing nothing, respecting Gaudí’s master plan to the letter. Limited as always by precarious funding, Sugrañes continued to work on the three remaining towers and the Christmas tree that crowned the Nativity façade.
For Sugrañes and the junta, the problems facing the continuation of works on the Sagrada Família would quickly be overshadowed. From 1923 to 1930 the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was welcomed by the Catalan ruling classes, who felt increasingly threatened by unionism and anarchism and welcomed Rivera’s ‘strong’ response. However, Primo de Rivera immediately disbanded the Mancomunitat Catalan government and attempted to eradicate the Catalan language, persecuting traditional Catalan organisations and other separatist manifestations. Primo de Rivera’s call for an ‘España una, grande y indivisible’ meant that it was politic for the Sagrada Família to play down its well-known Catalanist associations. Primo de Rivera was as tough on the Catalan Church as he was on the trade unions with regard to their loyalty to the Spanish state. Intransigent priests who insisted on celebrating mass in Catalan were dismissed and even the Bishop of Barcelona, Josep Miralles, was finally moved sideways and sent into exile in Palma de Mallorca. The seemingly harmless sardana dance that sits at the heart of Catalan cultural identity was banned, alongside the more inflammatory Catalan anthem Els Segadors. Primo de Rivera introduced tough press censorship, banning most Catalan newspapers, and offered insidious encouragement to informers prepared to denounce those who failed to toe the line. By 1930, Primo de Rivera’s persecution of Catalanism had managed to negate all his earlier support from Catalonia’s institutions and ruling elite.
In architecture it was also easy to step over the line of what the dictatorship permitted. Puig i Cadafalch, one of Gaudí’s most gifted rivals, as president of the Mancomunitat had gone into exile in France when the government had been dissolved in 1924. In 1929, now rehabilitated, Puig i Cadafalch played a central role in organising the International Exposition, but then antagonised the dictatorship when the four freestanding gigantic classical columns placed at the foot of Montjuïc were torn down because of their perceived association with the bands of the Catalan flag.
Sugrañes would have to tread carefully. The dictatorship can hardly have forgotten Gaudí’s flagrant refusal in 1924 to obey the new law that forbade the celebration of Catalonia’s national day, the Diada, on 11 September. Attempting to attend the special mass at the basilica of Sants Justo y Pastor, Gaudí had refused to back away or speak to the police in anything but Catalan. Jailed overnight, at the age of seventy-three, the incident became an instant cause célèbre.
In 1928, a hugely important development for the future of the Sagrada Família was finally put in place with the designation of an undeveloped square opposite the planned Passion façade, crossing the Carrer de Sardenya, as a city park named the Plaça de la Sagrada Família. It wasn’t quite the result that Gaudí had hoped for in 1916 when he submitted to the city planners his idea of cutting four long triangular xamfres – chamfers – off the surrounding blocks to offer a more dramatic view of his temple. Nevertheless, it ensured that at least one façade could boast an undisturbed view for passers-by to step back and stare in wonder at its dramatic silhouette.
In 1929, way ahead of its time and indeed in one of those classic cases of putting the cart before the horse, Sugrañes also worked on plans, which have since been lost, for an electric lighting system to floodlight the dramatic façade. Gaudí, as Sugrañes well knew, was open to all the latest innovations as long as they made sense.
By 1930 Sugrañes had completed the three remaining towers of the Nativity façade, whose corkscrew spiral staircases had the ability to give intrepid explorers vertigo and claustrophobia at the very same time. With their fish-scale fenestration of slanted openings the four towers were some of the tallest and most arresting structures in Barcelona. Back in the 1860s it might have been the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà whose model for the Eixample gave Barcelona its distinct trademark grid pattern, but it was Gaudí, with these towers, who would transform the Sagrada Família into the city’s enduring symbol and seductive logo. Three years later, in 1933, Sugrañes completed the giant cypress tree that furnished the Nativity façade with a coherent silhouette. The cypress’s soft evergreen needles formed a backdrop to the polka-dot effect of cavorting white ceramic doves as the eye was led skywards to a red cross crowned by the Holy Spirit with wings outspread. Below, on the right-hand side, the Portal of Faith was still being finished with the help of Joan Matamala, whose father and grandfather made up a sculptural dynasty devoted to turning Gaudí’s dream into concrete reality. The Sagrada Família’s continuation had always depended on the cross-generational loyalty of families like the Matamalas and, most importantly, the Bonet and Bassegoda architectural dynasties.
The Portal of Faith, devoted to the Virgin Mary, has a striking naturalism that transforms the visionary and biblical into the everyday. The scenes depicted full scale are the Virgin’s visitation to Elizabeth, the adolescent Jesus preaching in the temple, the presentation in the temple with Simeon uttering his moving Nunc dimittis, crowned finally by a representation of the Immaculate Conception. Stealing the show, however, is a homely scene of Joseph and Mary in the carpenter’s workshop with the teenage Jesus, arm raised as if caught in slow motion, ready to bring down hard his woodcarver’s mallet on a chisel. It is an arresting idealised portrait of the holy family spearheaded by its patriarch Joseph, who represented the perfect model for the working man: humble, obedient, industrious and proud of his craft. The irony, of course, is that his son Jesus would become the revolutionary Messiah.
As Sugrañes was struggling to finish the Portal of Faith, the working man in Barcelona was being offered other routes to paradise, starting with improving his conditions while still on earth. Or, to put it another way, it was becoming politically imperative for those in a position of power to alleviate the hellish conditions that defined the miserable existence of a large percentage of the working population.
By January 1930, Primo de Rivera’s lacklustre dictatorship had run out of steam and military support. The initial reforms, which had succeeded in modernising Spain’s infrastructure, were eventually frustrated by Primo de Rivera’s inability to put limits on the reactionary power of the army and the Church, as well as his unwillingness to promote agrarian reforms that might upset the landed elite. His success in breaking the turnismo of the major parties, who had taken it in turn to rule Spain over the previous half-century would, however, leave space for more radical parties to fill the vacuum and operate on the main political stage. Having lost the support of the army and King Alfonso XIII, Primo de Rivera resigned, to die in exile in Paris a few weeks later.
Alfonso XIII was next. On 12 April 1931, the Republican parties swept to a landslide victory and two days later the king fled abroad. For Republican sympathisers the election victory heralded a period that has been immortalised as the Silver Age. This flowering of the arts is most closely associated with the poetry of Vicente Aleixandre, Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén, amongst others, but particularly the voice of Federico Garcia Lorca and his travelling theatre troupe, La Barraca. For the Catholic Church the Second Republic represented a terrifying threat. Cardinal Segura, Spain’s primate, forcefully ordered his flock to vote against the ‘anti-clerical’ government, which had placed restrictions on Church property, prohibited the religious orders from remaining involved in education, declared processions and public rituals anathema and banned the Jesuits, whom the great philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamuno described as the ‘degenerate sons’ of Saint Ignatius Loyola.
On 11 May 1931 arson attacks on churches, convents and religious schools in Madrid, Murcia, Malaga and Seville, which were terrifyingly reminiscent of 1835 and the Semana Trágica of 1909, polarised Spain and effectively killed off the voice of moderate Catholicism. In Barcelona, specifically, where ‘anti-clerical’ violence had a long pedigree, the Catholic Church, far from holding a monopoly on morals, was seen by the proletariat as at best ineffective and at worst both insidious and evil. The structure of the Church invaded every aspect of life. Alleged abuses of the confessional and charity only given in return for religious observance were two of the most common grievances that encouraged visceral hatred of the Church. There was little succour to be gained from an institution that preferred to see the workers’ miserable lot as somehow deserved and one to be suffered in silence. Or an institution that put its desire for power above its responsibility for delivering pastoral care. The paternalistic nineteenth-century vision of a congregation of working people modelled on the idealised Christian holy family found little resonance in a society that was about to explode.
It was against this backdrop that Sugrañes continued to build. While Gaudí and Sugrañes had undoubtedly dealt sympathetically with their builders on site, dealing with sickness and retirement with great tact, the religious community was nevertheless built with the expiatory spirit and the doctrine of original sin right at its core. The Sagrada Família school, under the constitution of 1931, would soon effectively become illegal. On 3 June 1933, Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Dilectissima Nobis struck back at the Republic’s attack on the Church, demanding all Catholics, using all available legal means, fight against those who had committed sins against his Divine Majesty and whose base greed had led them to expropriate its property, its vestments and sacred images. Pope Pius XI claimed: ‘Universally known is the fact that the Catholic Church is never bound to one form of government more than to another, provided the Divine rights of God and of Christian consciences are safe.’ For most Spaniards, and particularly those who listened to Cardinal Segura, this was blatantly untrue. The Church’s reactionary rhetoric was to be countered with revolutionary zeal. What the Church denounced as a growing ‘red terror’ had to be fought tooth and nail. In this explosive atmosphere, where Church and state seemed irreconcilable, even continuing to build the Sagrada Família could be read as a deliberate provocation and insult to the ideals and aspirations of the revolutionary Silver Age. Everywhere the poison of mistrust spread like a malignant virus, feeding those who predicted a collapse into civil unrest.
Sugrañes, although involved in politics before the First World War, was first and foremost an architect. The completion of the Nativity façade demanded almost no originality or interpretative skills on his part. The next stage, however, required him to reacquaint himself in depth with the models, plans and drawings that Gaudí had left behind. While Gaudí’s guiding leitmotif had been the grace and simplicity of the catenary arch, in practice the Sagrada Família was fantastically complex. Gaudí had struggled hard to arrive at what he imagined was a perfect synthesis of science, the decorative arts and architecture interwoven with Catholic liturgy, the history of the Catalan Church and the mystical geometry of the heavenly spheres; each part, like a building block, underpinning the other. Sugrañes had, of course, been Gaudí’s loyal assistant for almost fifteen years and had, like Rubió i Bellver, pondered over the master’s aphorisms, off-the-cuff comments, objections and half-processed theories, to establish a guiding rationale.
In 1917, Sugrañes published an essay in the magazine Iberia entitled ‘Disposición estática del templo de la Sagrada Família’. (Note that anything published by Gaudí’s assistants within his lifetime can be assumed to come with his blessing.) In the essay Sugrañes returned to the essential concept that Gaudí had developed, namely, that his ‘new’ architectural style was an improvement on the crippled Gothic style, which was supported by the crutches of the flying buttress. Before trumpeting Gaudí’s unique qualities, it’s worth stressing that the Sagrada Família is far more conservative than often claimed. There are good reasons for Gaudí’s conservatism. He was limited initially, as we have already seen, by the neo-Gothic footprint left by del Villar. Furthermore, his clients, the junta, and their target audience, the growing members of the Devotion, were often deeply conservative, if not sometimes reactionary. The neo-Gothic style was safe and comfortable, both solid and sedate and unlikely to scare anyone with an innate mistrust of the avant-garde.
Left to his own devices and given total freedom, Gaudí might have tried any temple format, from the vast spread of a circular dome to the gigantic single span of an industrial-scale nave, and every other variety of design in between. His sources of inspiration could easily have come from as far afield as the Mayan temples, the Buddhist stupa, Angkor Wat, Hagia Sophia or the Pantheon in Rome, whose photos he had so avidly studied while still at architectural school. But Gaudí made a deliberate decision to stay with the tried-and-trusted Gothic model of naves, aisles and transepts, whose symmetry and balance led the viewer in a direct procession from the great door straight up to the main altar. His first elevations, dating from 1898, were very much a halfway house between Gothic and his Modernista style. The four aisles running alongside the towering nave – with its vertiginous, typically Gaudínian catenary arch – were only a third of its height, and each was roofed out with a classic pointed Gothic arch. The novelty was not so much structural as in the detailing and the ornament.
It was not until 1915, having had the benefit of working on the elaborate model for the Cripta Güell and its church out in Santa Coloma de Cervelló, that Gaudí developed the radically new solution that we see today. The aisles in the Sagrada Família would now rise to two-thirds of the height of the nave and all would be roofed out with catenary arches. The aisle columns that join onto the central nave are slightly inclined but branch out halfway up like trees, to create one large diaphanous space, as intriguing as it is overwhelming. The branches cleverly distribute the load down through the columns, avoiding the need for the massive external buttressing that had in traditional Gothic churches often cast deep shadows onto the windows throughout much of the day. Using a system of placing columns directly on top of other columns, which then divided at the swollen branch collar – a perfect imitation of nature by the ever-observant Gaudí – the relationship of width and height of the nave could change dramatically in comparison to previous buildings. At the top of the clusters of columns, the series of vaults spread out like the leaves on a tree. What Gaudí had discovered was a structural technique for creating an open soaring citadel where the ‘heavenly’ Mediterranean light might become the major protagonist as the heavy Gothic structure of the Middle Ages was finally modernised and transformed into a luminous shell.
Sugrañes was embarking on the next stage of the Sagrada Família at just the wrong moment. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Manuel Azaña there was no sympathy for a Catholic Church perceived as having strangled Spain’s development by promoting a feudal, anti-liberal mindset. In the November 1933 elections, as the left-wing coalition disintegrated, the right-wing CEDA party – the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas – led by José María Gil-Robles, who modelled himself on Mussolini, won the elections but without an overall majority. President Alcalá-Zamora, in a deliberate attempt to rein in Gil-Robles’s totalitarian tendencies, asked the radical populist Alejandro Lerroux to form a government. What Alcalá-Zamora had not allowed for was Lerroux’s cynicism and CEDA’s patience. The following year, on 1 October 1934, Lerroux rewarded CEDA with three cabinet seats. The left-wing response was immediate, as anarchists and socialists called for a general strike.
On 4 October 1934, the Asturian miners’ strike rapidly evolved into an insurrection as towns and the provincial capital of Oviedo fell under their control. Following church burnings and the murder of more than thirty priests and businessmen, the government called for army intervention. Brutally suppressed by the young General Francisco Franco, the Asturian strike would leave a death toll of more than 3,000 miners, with ten times that number imprisoned and many more forced out of their jobs.
Despite the Lerroux government’s right-wing stance, it was extremely difficult for Sugrañes and the Junta of the Sagrada Família to negotiate their way through this minefield of shifting sympathies. Asturias had awakened them to the hatred and horror that the red terror had unleashed. If Spain was now hopelessly splintered, what hope could there be for an ‘expiatory temple’; an institution whose driving philosophy was seen as an integral part of the crisis that it had somehow hoped to solve.
For the moment, the two black years of Lerroux’s government, the infamous bienio negro, stalled many of the radical religious reforms that had been implemented by Azaña and given the Church some breathing space. However, with the collapse of the Lerroux-CEDA pact in January 1936, the left-wing coalition of the Popular Front won the elections and once again the Church felt threatened. The situation was exacerbated by the replacement of the relatively moderate Alcalá-Zamora, who had resigned once before on principle over the implementation of the Republic’s anti-Catholic programme by Manuel Azaña. Azaña, who had famously said that all the convents of Madrid were not worth one Republican life, alienated the moderates – those tragic figures caught in the middle who, with the benefit of hindsight, have been described as the Third Spain. With Azaña now occupying the post of president, many on the right gave up on parliamentary politics altogether and prepared themselves for a more serious conflict which they were convinced would have to be won by force of arms. On the left, the proletariat were consistently dehumanised by the Church and their protectors, the rural and urban elites and the army. The right-wing propaganda machine transformed left-wing sympathisers into ‘the beast’ responsible for the bloodthirsty red terror, who acted as lackeys of Moscow. ‘Red’ now became a catch-all epithet to describe anyone who didn’t agree with all the establishment’s ideas and dared to think differently or question the status quo that had fed off and brutalised the poor.
What the Church believed was that there was a highly organised conspiracy working to destroy it. During the spring of 1936, hundreds of separate attacks, including the firebombing of churches and political murders, understandably fed the paranoia across Spain. On the right, fuelled by the anarchist violence, the military conspiracy planning a coup was now in its final stages.
On 18 July 1936 the Nationalist military coup began. Within hours, using Spanish Morocco as a launchpad, Seville was the first major city on mainland Spain to fall to the insurgency, led there by the inflammatory sadist Queipo de Llano. News of the brutal repression of Republican sympathisers was broadcast in boastful reports by Queipo de Llano to sow the seed of terror in all those who dared stand in his way. The cult of violence was an essential aspect of the ‘crusading’ insurgents, who had a colonialist disregard for mercy and human life. Their troops were given free rein to cleanse Spain of what they described as bestial sub-human communist filth. Almost all the other major cities in Spain remained loyal to the Republic.
Under the leadership of José Giral, who was named Prime Minister of the Republic on 19 July, the loyal cities were ordered to arm civilian militia, which resulted in Barcelona falling almost immediately into the hands of the anarchists.
On the same day, 19 July, the CNT – Confederación Nacional del Trabajo – a confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labour unions in tandem with the FAI – Federación Anarquista Ibérica – spearheaded the defence of Barcelona and, after intense battles, isolated the rebels in the barracks of Drassanes and Sant Andreu. Alongside the POUM – the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista – the other unions and thousands of workers manning the barricades the CNT–FAI forces quickly rendered the rebels impotent. By 20 July the Catalan Generalitat President Lluís Companys recognised that the CNT–FAI had been instrumental in saving the Republic. Hard on the heels of the defence came the inevitable reprisals that turned rapidly into savage carnivalesque celebrations reminiscent of Brueghel’s Triumph of Death or Goya’s terrifying Desastres de la guerra. The world had been turned upside down and once and for all the workers wanted to cleanse the city of the social and religious structures that had suffocated them and kept them repressed. Fear had been transformed into a euphoric triumphalism that led to scenes of humiliation of the vanquished elite and wild demonstrations of the workers’ newly won power. Public spaces, like the squares, the Ramblas and, of course, Barcelona’s churches, had to be spiritually and physically, and often violently, adapted to suit new needs.
In a highly symbolic act, the grand Hotel Ritz in all its splendour was requisitioned by the CNT and the UGT and transformed into the workers’ canteen Hotel Gastronómico No. 1. From behind the safety of the barricades, deliberately left in place, it was now the turn of the revolutionary committees to create their brave new world.
Many of the stories about the appalling terror that swept the streets have now been accepted as Franco propaganda, but there was without a doubt a brutal settling of scores and a catalogue of ferocious violence. Historians continue to debate the levels of war crimes, intimidation and murders on the respective sides. It is generally accepted that Franco’s rebels murdered more than twice the number of the Republicans. Furthermore, the Nationalist terror was official policy, whereas the Republican atrocities were often, however bloody, spontaneous revolutionary outbursts not sanctioned by a centralised political leadership that had lost control and was trying to steer a path away from a hopeless descent into total anarchy. What is certainly true is that the murder of thousands of priests and lay workers was a propaganda disaster for the Republic and jeopardised international support. Rumours ran rife, as they had done during the Semana Trágica, that the priests were far more active than just spouting anti-Republican inflammatory rhetoric from the pulpit. Inevitable fear of the mythical well-trained fifth column – the enemy within – ever-ready to crush the Republic, led to suspicions that the religious communities were storing arms. Any religious community or building was now a legitimate target.
Anti-clerical violence, as Maria Angharad Thomas argues in The Faith and the Fury, while unarguably destructive, was seen by many of its perpetrators as a deliberate political act to provide the building blocks for a new society purged of the poison of the past. Nuns, who were often regarded as victims, were therefore seen as being offered freedom from oppression by the burning down of their convents. Priests, recognised as part of the apparatus of oppression, became legitimate targets. Tragically, even those whose lives had been dedicated to selflessly serving the poor were sucked into the terrifying tornado of terror and punished for the sin of association. Only very few communities were brave enough to risk provoking the wrath of the mob to save the lives of their priests.
On 20 July, a group of FAI vigilantes attacked the Sagrada Família. It had been miraculously spared back in 1909 during the Semana Trágica, but this time it was not so lucky. Within hours, more than fifty years of work went up in smoke as Gaudí’s drawings, correspondence and photographic archive were put to the flames. Thousands of man hours dedicated to complex calculations, as Gaudí patiently developed his modular structure for the Sagrada Família, perished in minutes. From the photos of Gaudí’s studio that are still extant we can reconstruct the look but not the content of the hundreds of rolls of architectural plans. In the sculpture and model studios the anarchists ran amok, smashing everything they could find including the elaborate models and the fragile plaster 3D details which Gaudí preferred above all else. The pungent smell of acrid smoke, the leaping flames and the sound of splintering wood followed by mini-explosions as sculptures smashed to the floor must have been overwhelming. Who knows what was lost from the closely annotated books and catalogues, or, for that matter, the clues to understanding the sources for the symbols and the painstakingly planned iconography? One of the few things saved were the plans for the Sagrada Família school’s building by Gaudí’s assistant Francesc Quintana, who bravely sneaked in unseen after nightfall to gather what he could, in imminent danger of losing his life.
Just as damaging was the destruction of the stone yard, where the rough blocks were prepared. In the sculpture and carpentry workshops and the studio for the model-makers, all the expensive machinery was vandalised and the buildings set on fire. Two family homes, the porter’s lodge and the house of an assistant to the crypt were razed to the ground. The labourers’ dressing rooms were torched and the finials around the apse, not yet in place, were thrown down into the crypt and smashed. Looting and the theft of valuables, as recorded across Barcelona’s other religious sites, was very low on the agenda. What was important was to ‘purify’ the space and kill off any possibility of continuity while suffocating the vital memory of any sacred presence. All that Gaudí’s work meant to the iconoclasts was its assumed association with religious repression, which had now been crushed underfoot. While in Barcelona working as a volunteer for the Red Cross, the poet Sylvia Townsend Warner observed that churches had been ‘cleaned out exactly as sick-rooms are cleaned out after a pestilence. Everything that could preserve the contagion has been destroyed.’
In the Devotion’s newssheet, the Hoja Informativa, they described the whirlwind of wanton destruction as creating a scene even worse than a bombing. Having destroyed and burnt as much as possible, the anarchists moved down into the crypt to desecrate the tombs. What the anarchists wanted and what they achieved was to strip away and annihilate every vestige of the sacred. The stone lid to Gaudí’s tomb was broken, but they quickly moved on to the family shrine of the Bocabella family, where they proceeded to disinter the corpses and in a ghoulish parade march them out onto the street to macabre shouts of how they had found some rich ‘marquesas’ for a final waltz.
Scenes like this were repeated all across the city as value systems were turned upside down and a lust for revenge, obscenity and the breaking of age-old taboos created new rituals of humiliation. As in the public hangings on Tyburn’s Gala Day in London, the auto-da-fé in Toledo or at the foot of the public guillotine during Paris’s Reign of Terror, death became a spectator sport. On the Passeig de Sant Joan, one of Barcelona’s wealthiest streets where the gent de bé normally promenaded of an afternoon, 40,000 people walked past the imposing Salesas Convent, built by Joan Martorell, to stare at the grotesque spectacle of a row of disinterred nuns, propped up, decomposing, leaning against the wall.
The orgy of destruction that swept Barcelona was a perfect example of the Catalan character trait of rauxa – an explosion of crazy, impulsive, hot-headed behaviour –fuelled on this occasion by a mixture of fear and delirious exaltation. The atmosphere was as volatile and incendiary as a can of petrol poured on a fire. Gossip and rumours surrounding the events spread far and wide.
Already in his preface, ‘Gaudí’s vision’, to the work of Clovis Prévost and Robert Descharnes, La visión artística y religiosa de Gaudí, Salvador Dalí had celebrated Gaudí. In his usual bombastic style Dalí declaimed: ‘the last great genius of architecture was Gaudí, whose name in Catalan means “orgasm” just as Dalí means “desire” . . . I explained that orgasm and desire are the distinctive figures of Catholicism and the Mediterranean Gothic reinvented and carried to paroxysms by Gaudí.’
On 19 August 1936, from his mountain hideaway in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Italian Dolomites, Dalí sent his friend Picasso a postcard keeping him up to date. No doubt toadying to Picasso, whom he knew hated the work of Gaudí, his tasteless exercise in shock employed to the full the famed Spanish black sense of humour and Dali’s morbid curiosity – his adolescent morbo. ‘The other day in Barcelona in the afternoon a friend of mine saw Mr Antoni Gaudí crossing the Via Laietana, he was being dragged along with a rope around his neck, he had a bad look about him (which was to be expected in his state) he has aged pretty well (he was embalmed) having just been disinterred. The anarchists always know where to find a good pot of jam.’ Back in 1900, Picasso had written to a friend, ‘If you see Opisso – tell him to send Gaudí and the Sagrada Família to hell.’ It is doubtful if during the intervening years he had in any way changed his mind.
Like most gossip, however, this muddled the facts. Another well-known observation on Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, in a similar vein, was penned by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell, who arrived in Barcelona later that year, on Boxing Day 1936, described the Sagrada Família as ‘one of the most hideous buildings in the world’, and added that ‘[the anarchists] showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance’.
The great Gerald Brenan, a connoisseur of Spanish culture, was just as dismissive. With Anglo-Saxon cynicism he laid Gaudí low. In his book The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War, he stated: ‘That vast, unfinished, neo-Gothic church, the Sagrada Família, is decorated with stone friezes and mouldings representing the fauna and flora, the gastropods and lepidoptera of Catalonia, enlarged mechanically from nature so as to obtain absolute accuracy. Not even in the European architecture of the period can one discover anything quite so vulgar or pretentious.’
Orwell was closer to the mark than he knew. Following the initial wave of destruction, the FAI returned to the Sagrada Família later on the same day to dynamite the Nativity façade and erase Gaudí’s monument forever from the city skyline. Either through inexperience or because they were persuaded by Sugrañes, Rubió or workers loyal to the project prepared to risk their lives, the anarchists gave up, leaving the towers to stand amongst the smoking ruins.
It is a poignant reminder of how little had changed since 1909, when the poet Joan Maragall had written his compassionate article ‘L’església cremada’ for La Veu de Catalunya. His hopes that both parties, the bourgeoisie and the workers, could find a common ground for reconciliation proved to be a sad reminder of a misplaced optimism. ‘Enter, enter,’ Maragall invited. ‘The door is open; you have opened it yourselves with the fire and iron of hatred. By destroying the Church, you have restored the Church, which was founded for you, the poor, the oppressed, the desperate.’
The material carnage left behind was devastating enough. Many blamed Sugrañes’s premature death in the summer of 1938 on his abject despair and sense of impotence faced with the impossibility of continuing the works. The bricks and mortar and abandoned rubble left on site must have been totally dispiriting, even heartbreaking.
On 20 July, or a few days later, the revolution would demand a human cost. Mossèn Gil Parés, the chaplain of the crypt at the Sagrada Família, who ten years earlier had sent a search party out to find Gaudí the night he was run over by a tram, was now a target for the FAI. He was tracked down and murdered on 26 July, found with seven bullets in his head. With ruthless efficiency Consol Puig, a teacher at the Sagrada Família school, and Clodomir Coll were also killed for having offered Gil Parés shelter. Ramon Parés, Mossèn’s brother, founder of the Red Cross in Terrassa and right-wing politician, was gunned down the following month screaming defiantly, ‘España católica es inmortal.’ Six months later in January 1937, discovered hiding in a house with family members, Dr Francesc Parés, Vicar General of Barcelona and president of the Junta of the Sagrada Família, was assassinated. The hunt for the Catholic power structure and its sympathisers was relentless. In March, Dr Ramon Balcells, founder of the Caixa de la Sagrada Família, the Sagrada Família’s savings bank, which had transferred its funds for safety to the City of London, was murdered in the Pyrenees en route to exile in France. Balcells, who had negotiated with the anarchists and paid blood money to ensure the safety of other priests, could sadly not secure his own life. Of huge spiritual importance to Gaudí was his confessor, the Oratorian Agustí Mas, who was based at the church of Saint Felipe Neri in the heart of the Barri Gòtic. Mas shared with the architect a passion for Gregorian chant and believed, like Gaudí, in the transcendent power of beauty. Jailed in February 1937 in the anarchist prison of Sant Elies, he was released the following month for a final paseo up to Montcada, where he was shot in the back of the head and thrown into a trench. In total, twelve people associated with the Sagrada Família were killed: a group that is now known collectively as the Twelve Martyrs of the Sagrada Família. They are, like Gaudí, in the process of canonisation.
Many of Gaudí’s friends, including the Jesuit philosopher and historian Ignasi Casanovas, were also victims of the revolutionaries, who became increasingly violent as they retaliated following news of appalling Nationalist atrocities. Even Barcelona’s Bishop Manuel Irurita, who was caught hiding in the Tort jewellery workshop disguised as a worker, was executed. Caught between the contrary demands of immediate revolution or the more pragmatic necessity of focusing on an organised and centralised war effort, Barcelona soon descended into the paranoid chaos of a war-within-a-war that Orwell so poignantly described.
Perhaps it was a blessing that Gaudí was not alive to witness the devastation and the shattered dreams of trying to build a spiritual community that celebrated the humble working man and the value of handicraft, and one that at its very core professed its religious reverence for nature. The greatest loss to the Sagrada Família was that human sense of continuity and ownership that many of the builders had enjoyed.
As a project, the Sagrada Família was finished but not yet dead.
On 1 June 1939, in edition No. 7 of the Hoja Informativa, the Devotion published an information update to commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of Gaudí’s death. In the headline article they concluded that had the architect been alive to witness those sad days of 1936 there was absolutely no doubt that he would have joined the long list of religious martyrs. Underneath the headline a photo showed the studio as Gaudí had left it behind; crammed with furniture, hanging lamps, drawing boards, spilling over with plans and drawing instruments, compasses, set squares, plaster maquettes and large-scale models that reached high up towards the ceiling, all of which no longer existed.
For the entire duration of the Spanish Civil War in the Republican zone, particularly in Barcelona, any demonstration of religiosity or sign of bourgeois ‘decadence’ expressed in style of dress or otherwise was an invitation for violent repercussion. No substantial record of the wasteland that was once the Sagrada Família now exists. Once all the metal from railings, religious furniture and images had been scrapped and recycled for the armaments industry the site was left to deteriorate as a ruin for children to explore, for cats to scavenge, and the crypt below ground transformed into makeshift toilets with Gaudí’s grave defiled as a dump for used sardine cans, broken bottles and other rubbish. Suspended across the four towers, covering the polychrome Hosannas that today invite the passing public to prayer, a large banner advertised ‘Alistaos en las Juventudes Libertarias’, a call to join the FIJL, the anti-authoritarian Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth.
By January 1939, it was clear that the Second Republic’s last-ditch offensive of the previous autumn, at the Battle of the Ebro, had proved a costly failure. Barcelona was effectively doomed. On 15 January 1939 Tarragona fell and, eleven days later, on 26 January, the revolutionary city of Barcelona was entered by Franco’s victorious troops. Ahead of the advance, more than 400,000 Catalans in fear of their lives fled across the border only to find themselves penned in behind barbed wire on the beaches of France; cold, hungry and exhausted with all their illusions shattered, to be employed as forced labour and future prey for the incoming Nazis.
Those who remained in Barcelona were either Francoist sympathisers or those who through inertia hoped somehow to survive the terrible storm of repression about to be unleashed. Much of the fabric of Barcelona’s Catholic Church had been destroyed. It was not just the symbolic Sagrada Família that lay in ruins. Almost forty churches had been totally destroyed and many convents completely burned out. Others had been gutted, stripped of anything that might be associated with their Catholic DNA, with religious images occasionally lined up and ‘assassinated’ in a symbolic firing line as if they were somehow alive. The empty cavernous spaces were transformed into repositories for war materiel, used as stables, shelters for refugees, as markets, cemeteries, ballrooms or, like the church of Bon Pastor, turned into garages, or, like Cristo Rei, used as petrol stores. Almost everywhere the archives and records had been torched in order to leave behind a tabula rasa.
On 1 March 1939, with Madrid still desperately holding out for the Republic, the administration of El Propagador de la Devoción a San José felt safe enough to publish No. 1 of their Hoja Informativa. Considering the damage to their temple it is not surprising that their rhetoric spoke of satanic criminal hordes and the enemies of God who had desecrated their sacred space. It was all too easy to fall into the trap of seeing Spain in terms of a simplistic Manichean duality of good versus evil. Having disinterred the Bocabella family the anarchists had left their corpses abandoned in the street for three full days. Beyond the language of recrimination, however, there was also hope. Mossèn Gil Parés had once asked Gaudí, ‘What would happen if a war were to destroy the Sagrada Família?’ and before he had finished the question Gaudí had responded, ‘We would build it again.’
The new chief architect, whose first job was just to rescue anything from further damage, was Francesc de Paula Quintana, who had worked under Gaudí and Sugrañes since qualifying as an architect in 1918. Gaudí had admired his skills as a draftsman, which were close to ‘perfection’, but found him rather slow. Other colleagues, such as Joan Bergós Massó in an article entitled ‘La bienhechora campechanía’ – the benevolent comrade – delighted in his constant good humour, his jokes and love of a good tertulia. A few years later it was Quintana who had been entrusted with curating the homage to Gaudí after his death in the Sala Parés in 1927. In the few commissions that Quintana completed on his own there was a distinct paring-back on decoration in keeping with the Noucentisme style that Sugrañes had also employed.
What was left of the workshops was in most places nothing more than the stone slabs on the floor under piles of rubble. Water pipes had been sawn through for the metal or smashed and split. The ceiling of the crypt was leaking and everywhere pools of stagnant water mixed with rubbish and ordure gave off a pestilential smell. Quintana was fortunate that José Brasó, who had worked at the Sagrada Família for the previous thirty years, was not too shaken by the terrible disaster and prepared to resume his job as foreman in charge of the clean-up.
Quintana’s painstaking eye for detail and his slow pace were the perfect attributes for dealing with the task at hand. Old photos show shelf upon shelf of near-identical broken fragments of white plaster, which had been patiently collected and catalogued in order to rebuild a fraction of the original model. This would prove the most complex of jigsaw puzzles, often with many different puzzles confusingly scrambled up. The idea was that even from the slightest visual information the team might eventually extrapolate the whole structure. In a sense this could be best described as the archaeology of the future.
The restoration process focused not just on the fabric of the basilica but also the restoration of the values that had been in danger of being lost. The Hoja Informativa offered up its bimonthly homilies under the strapline ‘Consideración moral’, reflecting only too accurately the new mindset and values celebrated by the Franco regime.
The Hoja Informativa was disgusted by the influx of returning bourgeois celebrating their good fortune with cenas americanas, their modern style of dress, with the women smoking while sipping elegantly at their imported cocktails and addressing each other with familiar nicknames learnt abroad. The Hoja lamented, in an eternal refrain, the sad loss of true Catholic family values. Already the siren call of Hollywood from ‘Yanquilandia’ was tempting the young, Hoja warned ominously. It was, in their opinion, a lamentable phenomenon attributable to the amoral machinations of a Jewish conspiracy that planned to lead their innocent children astray. The ‘cow boi’ with his revolver seemed preferable as a role model to the peaceful shepherd, just as the colourful Apache war bonnet was preferred to the mantilla-wearing aristocrat with her elegantly carved peineta. Even in the mundane and intimate areas of everyday life, the idealised hogar – the mythic home – where the mother nurtured her flock, the Hoja warned against the dangers of imminent deracination.
With the death of Pius XI in February 1939, fresh winds were blowing through the Vatican. Encyclicals such as Non abbiamo bisogno (1931) and the two now famous encyclicals of 1937, Mit brennender sorge – With Deep Anxiety – and Divini redemptoris, had respectively highlighted Pope Pius XI’s fears about the excesses and inherent racism of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Nazi state and Stalin’s totalitarian regime. While his successor Cardinal Pacelli, who adopted the style of his predecessor as Pius XII, suggested a carefully calibrated continuity, his reputation has since suffered due to his polemical stewardship of the Catholic Church through the Second World War.
Most importantly, Pius XII’s message Con inmenso gozo to the Spanish faithful on 14 April 1939, celebrating Franco’s victory, spoke as much of conquest as it did of the hope of future reconciliation. In the case of Franco, the pope’s message regarding forgiveness and mercy fell on completely deaf ears. Franco’s preferred modus operandi was brutal repression which offered humiliation and forced labour as a cure-all, with extra-judicial extermination meted out to those who stood in his path.
Pius XII began his message:
With great joy We address you, most dear children of Catholic Spain, to express to you our fatherly congratulations for the gift of peace and of victory . . .
The designs of Providence, most beloved children, have once again dawned over heroic Spain. The Nation chosen by God as the main instrument of the evangelization of the New World and as an impregnable fortress of the Catholic faith has just shown to the apostles of materialistic Atheism of our century the greatest evidence that the eternal values of religion and of the spirit stand above all things.
On Good Friday, 7 April 1939, in a defiant gesture against the scenes of total desolation that the Catholic faithful found all around them, a statue of the crucified Christ was brought in procession through the pouring rain to the exact spot where the Sagrada Família school had once stood. With due solemnity the statue was blessed. It was the symbolic first step on the long Via Crucis. From the ashes, the congregation was promised, there would once again rise a new church.
On a more practical level, with nowhere left in a vaguely suitable state for worship or to celebrate the mass, the Devoción was moved – until further notice – to the Dominican convent two blocks down the Carrer Mallorca on the corner of Roger de Flor. Slowly – peseta by peseta – the limosnas requested to finance Quintana and his team started to come in. Once again, the Llibreria de los Herederos de la Viuda Pla, down in Born, where Bocabella had started the whole enterprise back in 1866, was open for business, ready to accept donations.
What was remarkable was the continuing commitment to the project. Passing through a crucible of terror and appalling chaos, it had truly been a trial by fire. It was also obvious that there had been a catastrophic disconnect between the temple and the people it had been built to serve. They had rejected it violently. Faced with this painful revelation, the never-ending piles of rubble and the financial hardship, it is not surprising that many felt totally dispirited. It was without a doubt the lowest point in the entire history of the Sagrada Família. As a private Devoción which existed thanks to the generosity of its benefactors and with no insurance to cover war damage, it is hard to see how they could use the begging bowl to recover the lost investment. The progress had never been faster than snail’s pace, at best. And it is almost miraculous that the architects who had worked with Gaudí before 1926 were prepared to return after the Spanish Civil War and devote the rest of their careers to starting all over again, back almost at square one.
Throughout the 1940s work on the Sagrada Família effectively ground to a halt. Almost all its supporters’ energies were focused on restoration of the damage, further research and deep reflection. This was not the time for large-scale construction projects, unless, like the Valle de los Caídos, they were underwritten by the state and employed slave labour supplied by defeated Republicans as part of Franco’s policy of moral purification. Franco’s desire to rival ‘the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness’ was built on a scale to rival the Hapsburg El Escorial just a few miles up the road. This monument, built as a ‘national act of atonement’, while sharing with the Sagrada Família the Catholic concepts of sin and expiation, was on an altogether different scale. The Sagrada Família had no access to the state’s coffers, the national lottery or unlimited stocks of building material and workers.
During the Second World War, despite the close ideological ties and debts he owed to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Franco remained firmly non-belligerent. As ever, his apparent indecision, wedded to cynical pragmatism, proved effective as he teetered and teased with his regime’s demonstrations of shifting Anglophile or Germanophile sympathies. Exhausted and shattered by civil war, the country was not in a position to throw itself headlong into the conflict. Spain was on its knees. As Miguel Angel del Arco Blanco demonstrated so convincingly in his article ‘Hunger and the Consolidation of the Francoist Regime (1939–1951)’, during the 1940s starvation was used as a weapon or as a crude carrot and stick. Obedience was rewarded, while disobedience meant little or no food on the plate. The reality described in Paul Preston’s forensic dissection The Spanish Holocaust was for many a living nightmare, quite literally, hell on earth.
At the Sagrada Família site, with all possibility of playing an active role in the religious life of the parish now put on hold, Quintana’s patient leadership in the studio was of central importance in keeping up morale. His buoyant personality and expansive smile must have been some consolation for his two colleagues Isidre Puig Boada and Lluís Bonet i Garí. Although all three were confirmed Gaudínistas, they all had other work outside the Sagrada Família. Apart from his commissions for new buildings in Barcelona, Puig Boada was also responsible for restoring war-damaged churches in the geographically extensive bishoprics of Urgell and Solsona. Lluís Bonet i Garí, on the other hand, was busy working on a twenty-one-storey high-rise, the monumental Banco Vitalicio, a reinforced concrete behemoth on the stylish Passeig de Gràcia, which proved an enormous undertaking. The tallest building in the city, the Banco Vitalicio was heavily inspired by the Chicago School. It couldn’t have been further away in either its style or mentalité from the Sagrada Família. More importantly, Bonet i Garí was also the patriarch of a family who would all find employment at the Sagrada Família: his son Jordi Bonet i Armengol would take over as lead architect, his son Lluís was the parish priest, and his nephew Jordi Bonet i Godó would find work there as a sculptor.
In 1944, Quintana reorganised the Junta Constructora del Templo, who rubber-stamped his position as the director of works. Although nominally in charge, Quintana’s period as director should really be seen as a coming-together of this trinity of talents. The most pressing issue, after the clean-up, the restoration of the models and securing the perimeter fence, was to forge ahead with the Passion façade. The most important aspect of the research was to investigate whether Gaudí’s calculations were in fact accurate. The implementation of the design concept from drawing board to plastic reality would take the rest of the decade.